Star Wars Inconsistencies, #1
I like Star Wars. As I often do, today I was staring out of my window at the mountains behind my office building and got to thinking about things that don’t add up.
Everyone knows that a homing beacon was planted on the Millenium Falcon that allowed the Death Star to find the hidden Rebel Base on Yavin 4. What I can’t find (anywhere on the internet, so it must not exist…) is anything saying that the homing beacon was removed.
This would seem to imply that the homing beacon was never removed, thus the opening entire plot of The Empire Strikes Back disintegrates as the next secret Rebel Base on Hoth shouldn’t have been a secret- unless the only sensors capable of receiving signals from that particular beacon were destroyed with the Death Star. Given that the Galactic Empire was king of standardization- TIE Fighters, Stormtroopers, etc. I find this unlikely.
Wookieepedia states that the XX-23 homing beacon measures 10 centimeters in length. Because it also shows a picture of a circular device, I’ll assume that it was 10 centimeters in diameter with a full area of around 80 square centimeters. The given width of the Millenium Falcon, which can be used to calculate its area in a similar way (excluding the front “prongs”), is over 25 meters, for a total area of about 500 square meters. Taking into account the Falcon’s irregular surface and the task of finding such a small device seems difficult and time consuming at best- time that Han Solo and Chewbacca seemingly didn’t have time to do an exhaustive search.
And now that I think about it some more, why couldn’t the Empire detect the Falcon returning to the Death Star during the Battle of Yavin? Scramble more fighters to intercept it (not to mention the remaining X-Wings, who should have had literally thousands of fighters to get through in order to even make it to the Trench in the first place)? But I digress. If anyone can direct me to where I can convince myself that the homing beacon was/was not removed and that the Empire really was incompetent, please let me know.
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